


Event Horizon

by narcolepticbadger



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-01 03:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12696780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narcolepticbadger/pseuds/narcolepticbadger
Summary: Even as events in Hawkins continue to draw them inextricably together, Hopper — knowing what grief will come from it — wants to keep Joyce from stumbling into the black hole of his life. But, god, he wants her, too, and there’s a power in the energy between them that will abide no resistance.A chronicle of moments about fighting monsters, facing the end of the world (again), and falling in love.(Not necessarily in that order.)





	1. Physics

The night of the Snow Ball was crisp and clear and meant only for the young, pulsing as it was with songs Hopper didn’t even half-recognize, and so he willingly accepted his banishment from the gymnasium after watching El mount the steps alone, a nod and an unspoken _go get ’em, kid_ passing between them in the brief moment she had looked back for reassurance.

God, to be that young again, that bittersweet age when everything in the world seemed to hinge on being invited to the school formal.

He was not so old as to have forgotten what it felt like, that shivery-sick rush of asking a pretty girl to dance and knowing the soft touch of her hands over his shoulders, of being almost-caught kissing under the bleachers and rearing apart, breathless and heated, into the safety of the dark. But still, the advance of years had drawn a veil between then and now,  and Hopper did not regret it, this mantle of adulthood and responsibility he had to wear, until nights like this one sent nostalgia bleeding in, however stupidly, around the edges of his life — then, yeah, he missed the days he had survived on something other than coffee and quiet fury and the terror of loss.

 _Goddamn lucky kids_ , he thought, perhaps unfairly (knowing what he knew), and shook his head as he rounded the building.

Most parents, and the few older siblings tasked with chauffeur duty, had simply dropped their kids off and retreated until they were summoned again, but he saw Joyce leaning against her car, something of their old teenage delinquency still apparent in her pose, and thought it only natural, laughably _predictable_ , that they would be the two standing guard, such as it was, against any dramatics that might break out in a room brimming with adolescent hormones — and against worse things, the big end-of-the-world things that haunted them both for all they pretended to have moved on.

“Thought I might find you out here.”

It spoke to just how far they had already fallen into each other’s gravitational pull that he was no longer surprised when his feet unerringly guided him to Joyce’s side without his ever consciously seeking her out. They seemed to just… _collide_ these days, fumbling together in the in-betweens, in the weirdly-liminal spaces of hospitals and underground laboratories and parking lots that always seemed half-steeped in nightmare, as they tried to slip back into the routines they had had before Hawkins had exposed its terrifying insides to them, leaving scars that were slow to heal.

Joyce was hugging herself against the chill in the air despite her ridiculously oversized coat (he called it ‘ridiculous’ with fondness, amused by the way it swallowed her up), but her face quirked, lightened just a fraction, at his voice, and it was enough for him, to pull her out of whatever dark passageways her mind had surely been traveling before he interrupted, if only for a few minutes.  

She let him settle next to her against the car, and twisted a smile at his dumb joke, and she was no more surprised to be found by him than he was by the force that insistently drew their paths together as they passed a cigarette back and forth. The familiarity of the ritual, their practiced exchange between warming fingers and breaths, was a strange comfort: it _meant_ something, for all that it was such an ordinary gesture, for all that in-the-grand-scheme it would have been nothing worthy of committing to memory.  

And it felt right, this sharing — of the war they had been through twice now, of the small gains they had made, like this companionable vigil in the parking lot, lined up against immeasurable loss — but he knew the danger of _needing_ , of letting the heart build its wants up to the heavens and then, suddenly, watching them catch fire and fall, endlessly, like that story of Icarus they had been taught in fifth grade.

(Except Hopper kept surviving the fall, and he wasn’t sure if that made the continued mess of his existence more of a comedy or a tragedy. It was probably better not to know.)

It felt right — _she_ felt right, all soft angles fitting just-so against his side — but he was not a good man, and he would die before he let Joyce understand that, before she sowed her grief in him too deeply and mistook what he could give her for something else (not love, never that) and the black hole surrounding him burned the light out of her, too.

She had saved him, she had _fought_ for him, when the not-earth had tried to claim him (Hopper remembered: her trembling voice, and her hands testing the reality of his face, and desperation in them both), and what had he done in answer but fail her, but stand by helplessly as others shouldered the burden of their survival?

The man he hadn’t saved — he _couldn’t_ have, he told himself, but reason didn’t stop him from wondering at the truth of it, from seeing Bob reach toward them, still aware, as Hopper forced Joyce to flee to the other side of the glass — had been different. Sure, everyone had thought of Bob as kind of ordinary, a little dorky, but he had proved himself a better and braver human than the rest of them, even before the end.

No, Hopper was not _good_ , not the way Bob had been, and not the way Joyce and her boys deserved, after everything that had happened.

She needed someone stable, and dependable, and without a history of ruining the wondrous things that came his way, and for that he would take these lonely parking-lot moments as the small, painful gifts they were (he needed them, and maybe Joyce did too, and that was enough to suffer the slowness of drowning) and never strain for anything more.

But then he foolishly stumbled into talking of grief, of things getting easier, because he thought she might find a tiny solace in it, and instead it mangled something inside them both, disturbing wounds that were happier laid to rest.

Joyce looked up at him with naked pain, all that she had been bearing alone seeming to break at once, and he recognized that look too well, had seen it in his own mirror an untold number of times (after… well, _after_ ). She folded willingly into his chest, and his lips pressed into her hair, idling longer than necessary in a wordless communication of sympathy, and he cursed himself for having nothing more to offer than this meager physical support.

Her hand rose to overlap his, their fingers intertwining at her touch, even as Hopper turned his head away from her near-silent tears in respect — they were not meant for him — and lifted his eyes to the stars, to all the gods he didn’t believe in, and he found himself asking: to be allowed to give in, just a little, to what he needed, to what they _both_ needed, without the promise of mutual destruction nipping at their heels.

_Maybe if we just hold onto each other._

_Maybe if I try this time_ — _if I_ really _try._

And still the intensity of everything he felt (her heart beating in perfect counterpoint to his) troubled Hopper, for all that Joyce seemed to be reaching for him with the same sense of compulsion. But, god, he wanted _her_ , and he had spent a lifetime getting used to the mad descent from the heights of his own folly so that he sometimes forgot to fear the aftermath, to heed his own etched-deep warnings.

From all the laws of physics — velocity, and gravity, and a thousand others that Hopper had no hope of naming — he knew the profound truth of one: it wasn’t the fall that killed you.

(Maybe, this time, he could at least find some dearer place to break himself against when the impact found him.) 


	2. Rest

They hadn’t said much after his curt _I_ _got it_ after Frank had read him the address for (thankfully) the only Terry Ives listed in the state — what was there to say, exactly, about this whole damn thing? — until Joyce asked him, with a wry glance, how much he missed sorting through the dull reports that criminal ‘investigations’ in Hawkins usually resulted in, all neighborly disputes and the occasional bike theft.

Hopper was halfway through telling her, chuckling lightly in reminiscence, about a bar fight he had once broken up between two old coots arguing over the right way to pull a pint when Joyce’s head shifted, fell gently against the window, and he realized from the slow and even flux of her breathing that he had probably been talking to himself for quite a while.

 _Yeah, seems about right_ , he thought, with only a touch of chagrin. He wasn’t great company, he knew, and he had no doubt that this was the first time Joyce had stopped her frenetic pace long enough to catch some sleep in… he frowned, trying to run through the necessary mental calculations of when Will had disappeared and what date the calendar had shown that morning, but he gave up after a few rounds of losing count, starting back at one, losing count all over again like a child clumsily tapping it out on fingers.

Well, _some_ number of days had passed, in a fugue that felt both nightmarishly endless and too-quick at once, since she had last slept, surely, and Hopper didn't have the heart to disturb a respite so badly needed. 

Not yet, at least, when there was a span of miles left to go before they found Terry Ives, and maybe something more, a _clue_ if not an answer entire. He had a feeling about this trip, like they were holding their eyes up to some secret keyhole and could, finally, almost understand how the pieces fit together: MKUltra, Brenner, the Hawkins lab — there was something _there_ , and Hopper couldn’t quite make out the shape of things from this distance, but he had felt it, back in the soft greenish light of the library when dread had prickled up the back of his neck, and now again in the hairs rising under his shirt, along his arms, that had nothing to do with the weather.

They weren’t going to like what they uncovered, any of it, but _knowing_ was an instinct driven deep in mothers, in parents, in any cop worth his salt (and Hopper hadn’t been worth much in recent years, but for Joyce he wanted to _try_ ), and so there was nothing for it but to press on, to hurtle toward the grounds of truth and deal with the damages inflicted by such a spectacular crash-landing later.

He saw the way Joyce was huddled into the passenger seat and had the brief, stupid urge to lay his jacket over her — stupid, because he should be concentrating on keeping the car on the road instead of letting his eyes wander to the exhausted woman next to him, studying the restless movement beneath her eyelids, the shaft of sunlight firing lines of copper through her hair.

Hopper was concerned about her, as much as he understood the crazed energy, the nights spent in delirious wakefulness, that came with losing a child, but this scrutiny felt wrong, verging a little too near an intimacy that wasn’t his to claim. Besides, Joyce didn’t look cold at all, comfortably ensconced in her own coat — just small, and tired, and younger, as sleep smoothed away the worry lines that had been building in the furrow of her brow, around the clench of her teeth, ever since she had descended like a storm on his office to report that her boy had gone missing.

Still, she looked so much like he remembered her, then, while there was no one in Hawkins charitable enough to say the same of Hopper, and he couldn’t help but wonder at it, at the way the years and the hard knocks that life had dealt them both had never quite touched her — here was the same kid who had bummed his cigarettes, sarcastic and sweet and tougher than most people gave her credit for.

As much as he wished this had never happened, that Joyce had been spared the grief of all the deception and dead ends and increasingly dangerous borderlands they seemed to be edging toward with each new revelation, it felt… natural, somehow, to be facing the worst by her side.

And so he eased off the gas a bit more, tuned the radio a notch softer as Joyce sighed in her sleep, because the unexpected serenity of the drive, and the fields of — what was that, soybeans? — scrolling past on both sides of the freeway, and Van Morrison singing _just like goin’ home_ out of the old speakers felt like rest for him, too, a peace he hadn't known in longer than he cared to remember.

This was one moment of refuge before they met the oncoming storm, and Hopper found himself turning off the interstate two exits early in favor of the back roads, poorly paved (he was held to a steady navigation around potholes, slowing further over roughened patches of asphalt) and even more poorly marked, telling himself that delaying another ten or fifteen minutes wouldn’t matter when they still didn’t know what they were looking for, when this had never been an ‘ordinary’ case of a kidnapped or runaway kid and therefore necessitated a different set of rules. 

He followed the meanderings of the road laid out in front of him, taking a few extra turns until they entered the block where Ives was supposed to live, and if Joyce thought to question why a 25-minute drive had nearly doubled itself in length, he could half-honestly answer that the complete lack of street signs had led him astray more than once.

He checked the address he had scribbled down against the house, squinting at both lines of numbers until they aligned, and let the last song on the radio fade out before finally, regretfully, sighing and reaching across the seat to rub Joyce’s shoulder.

The word rolled off Hopper's tongue without thought, too familiar to be anything but an endearment (and when had that happened?), but it was too late to call it back, and he would not, even given the chance, for the way it felt right settling in the thin space between them.

“Hey, sleepyhead, we’re here.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't promise to always update this quickly, but I've been feeling inspired lately. Thanks for being so lovely about my entry into the Jopper/Stranger Things fandom!


	3. Blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally trying out something from Joyce's perspective, because I love the idea of her wearing some of Hop's clothing without even fully realizing it isn't hers (despite how absolutely and adorably huge it would be on her). Set immediately after the Gate is closed.

Joyce had found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that things in Hawkins seemed to happen, by turns, all at once or not at all.

There had been the rapid corkscrew from summer into autumn, the waking up one morning to find a minor flood of fallen leaves in the street and the sharp burn of campfire in the air, and, before that, the slow-unfolding agony of the past year: a relentless worry and the sense of always looking over-shoulder for the slinking darkness beyond, the trips to the laboratory for tests, the nightmares (both Will’s and her own), the questions spoken into a void of doctors and scientists that never deigned to reply.

And then everything had struck together, in the span of a few days, with hardly a space to breathe between the gut-punches of watching Will succumb to that _thing_ and watching Bob… she couldn’t bear to think the word, even now, couldn’t bear to feel it when she had Will and Jonathan and the others to train her attention on, to put her hands on each in turn and make sure everyone was safe as the world began to settle — much changed though it was — around them again.

Her house had become the meeting place, the headquarters of their ragtag resistance party, somehow, and so they all returned there once the Gate had been closed, drifting in from whatever scattered corners of the town they had been thrown to in a strange daze of weariness and exhilaration.

El had stepped immediately into the circle of her arms, and Joyce had murmured soothing things into the girl’s shoulder (all the thanks she could not put into words) as she exchanged a nod of recognition, of relief, with Hopper, stroking El’s hair and wiping away the line of blood beneath her nose when the girl finally pulled free.

The others stumbled in sometime later, considerably grimy (and considerably _bloodied_ in Steve’s case, though he stubbornly waved off her attempts to tend to him) and breaking the calm with their boisterous voices and pats on the back. Hopper raised an eyebrow at them, at their defiance of his rules, but it wasn’t a night for yelling, for discipline, when they had all made it through the fire, when they were so vibrantly _alive_ and carrying with them palpable energy and beautifully impossible — to any who hadn’t lived it — tales of war.

Joyce watched as Will and El were drawn back into the band of their friends, fitting into the places left open for them seamlessly, with easy acceptance, and she smiled tiredly at Hopper as he sidled over to her, hands sunk deep in the pockets of his coat.

“You had time to raid my closet while you were out there, huh?” he asked softly, eyes crinkling with amusement, and it was so far from anything she had expected him to say in that moment, when she still felt as though she were standing, weak-kneed, on some great boundary between reality and delirium, that all she could do was laugh.

Until she glanced down and saw the familiar blue plaid of Hopper’s favorite button-down with her own hands poking out of the sleeves, the hem of the shirt brushing low against her thighs whenever she moved.

Oh. Right.

She remembered shucking off her own coat and sweater in the unbearable heat of the cabin, and in the rush of their departure (in her overwhelming relief at studying Will’s face and once more seeing her boy — _only_ her boy — looking back at her) she had clearly grabbed for whatever covering was most convenient rather than for what was _hers_ , had thrown it around herself without a thought as they ventured back into the night.

“Sorry,” she said, warm with a clumsy sort of embarrassment. She reached to shrug the shirt from her shoulders. “I must have picked it up when we were leaving. My stuff is probably still on your floor somewhere.”

Hopper’s hands settled over hers where she struggled with the fabric, and his voice was gentle, insistent, as he urged, “No, no, that’s not what I meant, Joyce. Keep it.”

It was rare to hear him call her by name, particularly without the edge of irritation or panic they tended to use with each other (without malice, always, but the events that brought them together had little patience for that kind of intimacy), and the unexpected softness of his touch, of the way he half-held her, stilled her wholly. Hopper leveraged her hesitation against her and straightened his shirt over her frame anew, blanketing her in his twofold warmth.

“It, uh…” he started, then faltered, biting at his lower lip in a gesture that reminded Joyce of who they had once been, how young she sometimes felt when Hop passed her cigarettes and gave her that quietly conspiratorial smile, though the years had worked to harden them both. Thinking better of whatever he had meant to say, Hopper nudged his head toward the hundreds of drawings papering the walls around them. “It goes with the decoration.”

The intensity of the blues surrounding them, a fine maze of crayon and thread (and Hopper’s eyes, though she had never known it before) that pressed them near, really were strikingly similar, like sky and sea and shadow all overlaying each other. “It does, doesn’t it?”

Hopper had never quite released his hold on her, now moving to loose the strands of hair that had gotten trapped under the collar of his shirt during their negotiation and stopping, abruptly, with his fingers still resting lightly along the bend of her throat as if he had discovered something he couldn’t comprehend.

Joyce felt again the pressure, the immense strength of Will ( _not_ Will, but the monster that had taken up residence inside him) snaking up to strangle her, the colors leeching out of her vision as she fought for breath, but she hadn’t thought it enough to leave physical marks when the ache had dissipated, like the shadow vomited out of Will’s body, almost immediately upon release.

Hopper was still frowning down at her, a thin line of worry scrunching his forehead as though he feared he had hurt her himself. He didn’t press her, though, beyond asking “You all right?” in a way that managed to sound gruff and tender in one, and Joyce was grateful for it, for the distance they both kept from prying too deeply into each other’s wounds when they hadn’t yet had time to heal.

“I’m fine,” she said, and she meant it, as much as she could mean anything right now. She eased away from his touch, catching his arm before they separated completely and giving it a brief, reassuring squeeze. “It’s over, anyway.”

“Yeah, it’s over.” Hopper sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, and she knew that a shared uncertainty — an insidious _for now_ , because it was entirely too simple to believe that the Gate was enough, that their sacrifices were _enough_ to hold back the things crawling through Hawkins’ very nervous system forever — lay open between them, as it always had.

“I should get the rest of these kids home before… hell, I don’t know what _day_ it is anymore, let alone what time,” Hopper groaned, though he remained planted solidly beside her, appearing reluctant to actually make much of a move.

“Go,” she said, not unkindly, and nudged him toward the others, whose conversations had also begun to stall, peppered with dramatic yawns. “I think we’re all about to crash, and there are so many better places to do that than on this floor.”

Hopper nodded, finally cracking a hint of a smile. “Okay, well… call me if you need anything. And I mean anything.”

Joyce looked to El, so changed, in some ways, from when she had seen the girl last, and cocked her head up at Hop knowingly. “You too.”

She had to help him wrangle the kids — _like herding damn cats_ , he muttered to her at least twice, and she couldn’t argue with that — who, despite their exhaustion, seemed determined to extend their various adventures into a sleepover, more than willing to pile on her uncomfortable floor if they could stay together a bit longer. Eventually, Hopper charged Steve with ensuring that Dustin, Lucas, and a red-headed girl whom Joyce had never properly met got home safely, and he ushered the rest out of the door himself, calling a soft _’night_ over his shoulder as the latch clicked shut.

And, left in the sudden quiet, they did almost drop where they stood, Will and Jonathan and Joyce herself falling into the nearest available beds as the restless chaos they had been living for too long to number into days caught up with them. They ended up collapsed in the same bedroom, loosely connected through a sprawl of limbs as if they all needed to make certain of the others, needed the assurance of physical contact to find rest.

Joyce half-curled around Will, drawing the warm flannel of her shirt — _Hopper’s_ shirt, her brain protested, and she wondered idly how it had taken her so long to notice that fact when the fabric smelled so like him, all coffee and wood and tobacco, and a layer of cabin dust, too — over them both.

She would put the shirt in with their laundry tomorrow, return it to Hop and collect her own discarded clothes from him with another sheepish apology, but for now it felt something like shelter, a softness that she desperately needed, and so she pulled the flannel (that steady blue, like she was still being held by the gentle waters of his eyes) to her heart and breathed in its richness and didn’t dream, blessedly, of anything dark at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Event horizon: a point of no return, i.e., the points at which gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape (from a black hole) impossible, even for light.
> 
> Season 2 rekindled my Jopper feels like whoa, and this seemed like the best place to collect all the small moments that see them (ever so slowly) falling together. I'm always happy to hear your thoughts, flail with you, and/or accept prompts for something you'd like to see written, so hit me up here or at @loveexpelrevolt on tumblr. Thanks for reading!


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